


The Sky Is Ours, Now

by LieutenantSaavik



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucharest, Childhood, Colorblind Steve Rogers, M/M, Post CA: TWS, Synaesthesia, Synesthesia, colourblind Steve Rogers, pre ca: tfa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-07
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-20 01:59:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8232134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LieutenantSaavik/pseuds/LieutenantSaavik
Summary: Bucky plants plum pits that will never sprout while Steve wishes he could see the colours that everyone else effortlessly has.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sororising](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/gifts).
  * Inspired by [We colour the world with our hope](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7867951) by [Sororising](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sororising/pseuds/Sororising). 



Bucharest, circa 2015.

 

It’s a windy day outside; late autumn, perhaps, or just turning into winter. It doesn’t matter, though, does it? When you live a life like Bucky Barnes, time perpetually flows into meaningless blue spirals, ever-vanishing into the slurred mess of disorganized memories.

 

In his memory, though, it’s spring.

 

Steve kicks his heel into the dirt of the garden. Bucky’s got his hands deep in the soil, carefully planting pits from the plums of his sickly plum tree. He’s tried this every year, but none of the pits have ever sprouted. It’s a mark of how hopeful he was, though, that he kept trying, March after March, May after May. 

“It’s not going to work, Buck,” Steve sighs.

“It might!” Bucky shakes his head and throws a rotting pit away into the grass. “That’s the last of them. We can go in now, if ya want.”

“It’s pretty outside. Let’s stay.”

Young Bucky pats a bit of soil on top of the last planted pit and exhales, brushing a streak of dirt across his forehead as he moves his hair from where it’s fallen in front of his eyes. The sky is blue, with a few white clouds. A faint breeze is blowing -- or is it? Bucky seems to remember, mentally placing himself again in the garden, the boughs of the trees moving slowly back and forth. But were they really? It’s been so long, but he’s desperate for that small detail, that tiny validation that lets him know that what he’s remembering is real. The memory has also faded in colour, in a way, which is strange. At the same time, though, it’s taken on a sort of glow that seems to encase all his happy memories of childhood.

 

The fading colour reminds him of the time he told Steve he saw colours for sounds. He knows the name now -- he has Synaesthesia, a mental condition where certain sounds make colours in the experiencer’s head (or sometimes, though not in Bucky’s case, in their field of vision). But back then, it was just something he could do and couldn’t stop doing, seeing these colours. And was always Bucky’s mission to teach Steve about colours in any way he could. Steve could never see them until he got the serum, “fixing him” as well as amplifying his strength. And although Bucky was happy for him -- imagine not being able to see in colour for years -- he was also, in a tiny, selfish way, saddened. Steve didn’t need Bucky to teach him about colours anymore. He could see them on his own.

Steve gets to his feet and brushes a hand down his shorts hem. “Plums are, what? Purple, right?”

“Yeah.” Bucky also stands, pushing a strand of hair behind his ear. Any day now, his mother is going to insist he get a haircut or even cut his hair herself, but Bucky doesn’t mind having slightly shaggy hair. It’s not like it’s out of control or anything, right?

“They usually are, anyway. I mean, they can be red an’ stuff. And sometimes they’re red and sometimes yellow on the inside.”

“I bet it’s lovely,” says Steve, looking upward into the sky. He starts to whistle, a high-flying series of quick notes creating an attractive tune. Bucky tilts his head. The notes make tiny yellowish dots appearing and disappearing in his mind as he hears them. 

“I don’t know what colours plums would be to you,” Bucky adds. “Do you wanna try-”   
“No.” Steve drops his head to his shoes, stabbing his foot into the grass. He seems mad all of a sudden, but Bucky doesn’t know why. “No matter what we do, you’ll always have more colours than me, Buck.”

Bucky’s smile dies. “I’m sorry,” he says, for lack of anything else, approaching Steve and touching his shoulder. Steve jerks it away, though, scowling. “It’s not fair,” he says. “Everyone can do it and I can’t. I already can’t run or even  _ breathe _ right, and I can’t see colours either.”

 

It’s really not fair, and Bucky gets angry. So he decides at that moment to tell Steve a secret.

 

“Steve…”

“Yeah?” Steve meets Bucky’s eyes, clearly at least a little upset.

“You know how we’re looking for colours in the food, right?”

“Of course.”

“Well, we… Well, I…”

He doesn’t quite know how to say it. How do you explain this gift, these sounds that make colours in his mind. “Songs make colours, too,” he finally stammers out.

“Huh?” Steve’s now confused  _ and _ angry, a combination that makes Bucky slightly nervous. Steve is usually so gentle, the type to pick up baby birds, take them to his room, and nurse them back to health. Bucky hates when Steve’s mad at him; they’ve rarely fought, but Bucky’s despised every time. So he starts to talk faster, trying to explain.

“Well… yeah. Like, when you whistle, it’s yellow. And the violin my sisters play is goldish-brown. And piano is blue, usually. The middle notes, anyway. Some chords are blue and brown. Those colours go together a lot. I can tell you which colours are which, and...” he trails off. Is Steve mad? Is he happy?

Steve is nodding, though, looking intrigued. “So it’ll be like our food game, except-”

“Except,” Bucky’s excitement grows, even as he tries to tramp it down, “we wouldn’t even have to look! You just ask me, and I’ll tell you.” 

Steve starts to smile, his face mirroring Bucky’s. “Between this and the food an’ stuff,” Bucky continues, “you’ll have so many colours you won’t even need to see them! Cuz you’ll be able to taste them  _ and _ hear them, and that’s-”

He stops. It’s not almost the same thing. But Steve can’t know that, can he?

“It’s practically the same thing! I mean, really, by the end you’ll have so many colours you’ll be covered all over in ’em!”

Steve’s anger has vanished, and true to form, he’s now nodding excitedly. “So I’ll have colours in two ways! And I’m sure it’s not exactly right, but I’ll at least be closer!”

Bucky nods. “Yeah! It’s gonna be fun. When do you wanna start?”

“Well, why wait?” Steve plops down in the grass and fingers a blade. Bucky’s struck again by how grey Steve’s world must be; the grass and the sky might even look the exact same. Holding out a leaf and a tomato, they’d both be just… grey. It only makes Bucky more determined to teach Steve all the colours he can.

“What sound is red?” he asks.

This one takes Bucky a while. Red sounds are rare; orange and yellow are much more common. But, thinking back, he does have a memory.

“Remember… remember that street player that you wanted to leave a penny for?”

“Yeah, and mom wouldn’t let me. He had an accordion. Was that red?”

“Yeah! The accordion sound is red. Red and gold-ish, but red!”

“So strawberries and accordions.” It’s strange and seems so  _ arbitrary _ to Steve, but, thinking of the accordion sound, it almost does make sense. That’s red. That noise. That taste.  _ Red. _

“So what around here is red?”

Bucky scans his surroundings. “The brick walls of my house are...  _ kinda _ red. Kinda. But not the same as an accordion. So nothing, really.”

“Well,” says Steve, “what looks like the grass?”

“Oh! Well…”

Bucky pulls his mouth into a slash, chewing on his lip. Green is hard. “My sisters’ voices are both a bit green. It doesn’t look like grass, though. See, there’s more’n one green, and their voices are like a pine tree green with brown at the center. Grass is a brighter green.”

Steve looks like he’s getting mad again, so Bucky quickly covers. “I mean, uh, all the greens do look a bit similar. So just think of-”

Steve cuts him off. “What colour is your voice?”

Bucky thinks and then shrugs. “Brown, mostly. Some blue.”

“And me?”

“Greyish-brown. The kind of thing you think would be ugly but isn’t.” _ It’s really pretty _ , he wants to add. He can’t think of the word he wants to use at the moment, but something about Steve’s voice just says  _ Home _ .

_ Comforting _ , Bucky thinks, is the word his younger self was looking for. Comforting. He looks at his left hand. It’s also grey, but a  _ wrong _ grey, a grey so completely unlike Steve’s voice they might as well not be anywhere near each other on the colour spectrum. Steve’s voice is -- was -- soft, but Bucky’s been turned into jagged lines and hard edges.

When Steve said Bucky’s name was the precise moment he got his colours back. Hydra had taken them, along with his memory, personality, and hope, when they took him captive and zapped him into oblivion. But what voice does Bucky know better than Steve’s? The gentle grey, like the wings of a mourning dove, mixed with the most nurturing colour in the world, the colour of ground, of soil, of substance. It makes sense; they always have kept each other grounded. “Bucky?” Steve had said. And something had flashed, way, way back in the center of Bucky’s mind, for the first time in decades. He knows those colours. He knows that voice.

Closing his eyes, he goes back to the memory.   


“Grey?” Steve asks. “So my voice is the way I see the entire world?”

“Yeah, I guess? I mean, I don’t know how you see the world, but it’s kinda the same, yeah.”

“So I do know the colours my voice is!” Steve is triumphant now, full of the mercurial moods of being very young, and Bucky’s grinning and somehow both bouncing while sitting down. 

“Yeah, Steve! It’s  _ all _ like you. The whole world must be like you.”

Steve falls flat on his back and gestures up to the sky. “So the sky is blue, and my voice is brownish-grey, and your voice is brownish-blue. So if we went with the blue in your voice and the grey in mine, the sky is both of us. Because to me, it’s grey, like me. And to you, it’s blue, like you. The sky is both of us.”

Bucky is silent, struck by the simplicity yet beauty of what Steve said. “You’ve got a poetic mind, Rogers,” he says, finally. “And you’re right. The sky is ours, now.”

Steve grins. “Not bad for a Sunday, right? First the sky -- and soon, the world!”

“And then the world!” Bucky laughs. He pokes Steve in the side and lies down next to him, watching the colours of Steve Rogers against the shimmering green of early spring grass. There’s a certain special colour in the way the sun falls across his friend’s hair, and he decides he wants to find the sound that matches it.

  
  


But he never does.

  
  


Bucky drags himself out of the past and blinks away the memories. On a whim, and even though he knows he shouldn’t, he removes the newspaper from his window to see the sky outside.

To his surprise, the sky is half grey and half blue; a storm is coming in from the east, carried on the heavy wind. Bucky looks right at the line where they grey, building stormclouds fade to white and almost immediately to blue. “The sky is both of us,” he echoes. “Blue for me; grey for you.”

Slowly, he turns from the windowsill and sticks the newspaper back up. He doesn’t know -- how could he know-- that at the exact same moment, halfway across the world, Steve was looking at his sky and thinking of the exact same memory.

“Grey for me; blue for you. The sky is both of us.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much fanfic of a fanfic -- if you enjoyed this, please read We Colour the World with our Hope. It's one of my favorite works and it's truly luminous; I highly recommend it.
> 
> And all descriptions of synaesthesia here are accurate! Accordions are gold and red and Steve's voice really is grey brown, etc. At least to me, anyway. :)


End file.
